Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards It's time to stop comparing Acoustic with Digital

We MUST!

MUST we?

Mother, may I?

Please join in a moment of silence in remembrance....

We’ll always have those heady days of June 21’ .....
the thread that had it’s day .... after day in the sun
some said “ACOUSTIC!” while others said - your too quick
hold off from your dismissal of our young friend the digital
there is plenty of space for both to have a place
to each give us their conception of song
while we wrestle with “can’t we get along?” ....
and thoughts that this here thread
may now be done .... gone .... dead.

I think it's about time for acoustic piano streaming.

This is where you use your controller to control an acoustic piano with some kind of player system connected to the internet and the recorded audio is sent back to you.

Could new tech make something like that ever possible, so that it's actually playable, latency-wise?

You have already Disklavier, CEUS, Spirio systems if you want an acoustic reproduction… I am not sure streaming is really a need. With Spirio, you have access to a library of records.

I guess a streaming system will be possible and add a 1s latency to avoid jitter issues. (It doesn’t make it unplayable : the player listen its piano with zero latency).

I once thought more along the lines of somebody purchasing a Bösendorfer but disliking the keyboard and replacing it with a Fatar TP100LR, which can be done with solenoids and stuff like that, basically a quality DIY endeavor that will glorify the mighty Bosie.

Now we really need to compare the one today to the one 7 days ago.
What makes you change your mind..?

and still yes, we need to compare and we like to.

I just spent $210 today to have my Baldwin Acrosonic tuned.
The tuner was amazed at how good of shape it's in, for a 58 year old piano. No issues except it was seriously out of tune and one key was sticking.
Very light touch, very LOUD. I spent an hour playing it after he left.

For what it's worth in this discussion, I still prefer to play my $750 Casio PX-S3000. I like the action better and I like the way it sounds a lot better, so to each his own.
Maybe if I had a new Steinway or M&H I would think differently, but to lump all acoustics into one side of a discussion against all digitals on the other side is just plain stupid.

I don't agree about digital pianos (or electric pianos) just being acoustic piano substitutes. I know they started that way, and mainly because of their portability, but digital pianos have many features and sounds that we've grown to love using in modern music. On stage, band pianists will often shun a perfectly usable grand piano because they like their own action, of they want the connectivity, or they want to layer voices. They might still be playing "piano" most of the time, but maybe it's "grand piano", then "rock piano", then "ballad piano", and maybe the band needs to tune up to 444 or down to 438. Where I am, the grand pianos are mostly tuned to 441. And there's no reason why digital pianos shouldn't have slightly different sounds. There never was just one piano sound, not even among acoustic pianos. I would prefer a digital piano costing 1500 euros to a second hand upright costing 3000 euros. But as the prices get higher, the acoustic pianos become better value than the digital pianos, IMO.

Stage pianos and home pianos are different things. Stage requires lineouts, and sometimes mono. You might find it difficult to achieve a realistic spacial effect for the home, and then expect a good mono sound out of the L/H lineout.
A home piano, even if it sounded like a quality grand, might still not be popular with digital aficinados.
Thing about the acoustoc is its tone. Its a sharp instrument; larger ones will exhibit a deeper more resonant sound, but no way would the bass on your average digital pass muster with an acoustic.
Line up an acoustic with a digital. Hear the difference!
With a decent digital or software piano, you can make many of the necessary adjustments.

Some of us (Me) prefer a half way house!
And if I want, I can work on the rest.

There are pianists. And there are keyboardists. A true pianist will never shun a perfectly usable grand piano in favor of a synthesizer. I'm a pianist. I play an acoustic piano for work. I don't like action on my digital piano, I always prefer action on an acoustic grand. I don't need connectivity, I don't want to layer voices, I don't need varieties of piano sounds like "rock piano" or "ballad piano", my entire repertoire sounds great on one acoustic grand piano sound for which it was written. Therefore, I will always compare a digital piano to an acoustic piano, and choose the one that most closely conveys the experience of playing an acoustic grand.

Nah,

what we need is to compare a DP to an Acoustic... on how close it is to the real thing....

I'm not gonna touch the preferences of one over the other for specific performance applications. If we did, we might just hit 100 pages!!!

In Spring 2014 i bought myself beginner’s piano lessons for 55th birthday and soon after began the search for buying a DP. I knew APs existed, grew up with my mother’s Wurli AP in the house but i grew up an athlete .... a jock mostly ignorant of and not interested in the AP world ...... i really had zero awareness of any reason for searching based on how a DP would compare to an AP. I simply had a price range in mind and in newb fashion, plugged “ digital piano $600-800” into a search engine, hit the go button, began the hunt and expected to turn up a product to buy within a few days.

It took minutes to find numerous, seemingly relevant reviews. The first days of studying these became a week, then weeks, by the second month i found myself increasingly ensconced in unfamiliar lingo AND of course bewildered to the point of being derailed from what i originally thought would be a straight forward, quick shopping experience. Along the way i began to notice that for reasons i did not (yet) understand, some of the numerous reviews i had been reading seemed to have been written with a similar style of marketing flare that often gushed over how well this/that/other DP feature compared with this/that/other make of GP ..... AND upon investigating some of the fine print of these reviews seemed to indicate a possible connection to a handful of brands .... 🤔 .

One day i stumbled into a review that read like a composite made up of the writing from 6 separate authors, 5 who wrote in similar “ buy this or that DP “ style, but one of them actually explained things like, what is a DP key action, how is it built, how do the main pieces fit together and function? "........ within a month i tracked down the name of the latter, and their web site, devoured many of their reviews, talked to them by phone, bought sight-unseen a DP from them, progressed well with my lessons, discovered PW in 2015 where i began reading voraciously to the extent of registering as a new member in 2016 ..... where i eventually discovered that comparing to APs is seemingly innate to DPs .... and i now have learned, in general, to avoid naming the name of the reviewer who sold me my first new DP that gave me 15 months of lovely sounds before it wore out enough to provide me the first genuine case of G.A.S.

🙂

PS. Of course comparing must go on despite my remaining mostly in the middle of this necessary debate.

At about the beginning of the 21st Century I saw an ad for the most amazing camera ever made for the everyday consumer. It was from Nikon, and it sported an amazing 3 megapixels. No, it couldn't equal the quality of my little Minolta 35mm film camera, which was equivalent to 6.1 mp, but it was cool, and only cost around $3,000 or so.

Two decades later, long after 35mm film has bit the dust, I currently own the 50.6 mp Canon 5DsR digital single-lens reflex camera, which I bought on sale brand-new for $1,499. But owning the camera by itself doesn't do it. Taking full advantage of digital, I have an ultra-powerful computer that has the best development and enhancement software that consumers can buy, from companies such as Adobe, On1, Skylum and Topaz. Does digital make much of a difference here? Let's take just one small example...

With my Minolta, shooting in low-light conditions with anything even slightly moving required 400 ASA film, showing immense grain that no photo lab could possibly remove. Grain just went with the territory. The 5DsR, with 50 mp stuffed inside a full-frame sensor, can show noticeable digital noise at an ISO as low as 1600. At a setting of 12,800 the noise is beyond awful. But that's not a problem in the world of digital. Noise-reduction programs, such as DxO Deep Prime, Topaz DeNoise and On1 NoNoise not only remove all noise and fringing, but rebuild the image to look sharper than the original file. And as for the creative manipulation of photo images, comparing film to digital is like comparing a paper airplane to the world's most modern passenger jet.

The point I'm making here is that digital is totally open-ended, while mechanical processes are limited. This applies to digital pianos as well, although for the time being it only holds true for the home market. But along that line, when I can afford the successor of the Kawai CA99/79 series, which should be released perhaps in the next two years, I will buy a DP whose sampled/simulated grand piano tones will be more appealing than tones from an acoustic upright.

The math, then, is quite simple. Digital has nowhere to go but up; acoustic has nowhere to go...at all.

A Fender Stratocaster is not trying to emulate the sound of an acoustic guitar-- quite the opposite in fact. The comparable analogy of the Fender to acoustic guitar would be a Rhodes electric piano and acoustic piano. In both cases, the electrics are different instruments. None of these are digital instruments.

Digital pianos have the design goal of trying to emulate acoustic pianos. The need to compare the two is unavoidable because it is the measure of success or failure to meet the design goal of the product. The Fender guitar has no such objective.

I agree with you Sweelinck.

Digital pianos has some difference with acoustic pianos, but I consider high-end models quite close for my purpose.

However, I get an N1X… which mean that I have found an action from a real grand more enjoyable than simplified action we can have on lower models. It is unfortunate : I would prefer to pay less for something close.

Digital Pianos will continue to be compared to Acoustic Pianos until a digital piano will sound (and behave) exactly like an acoustic grand. And IMHO this will not happen so soon, considering the very slow progress in this particular market...

To sound like an acoustic piano, there are mainly two issues : the tone generator and the restitution.

The tone generator had many improvements : blended layers, resonance modelling… perhaps the next one will be unlooped samples (with enough memory). It is already available on some DP.

The restitution will surely not improve excepted in high-end digital pianos. Improving or adding speakers costs some money ! Perhaps the CA99 soundboard is the correct way, but it is smaller than the one of an acoustic piano. I remember an advanced pianist which was very impressed with a Transacoustic piano when used has a DP with soundboard.

On CLP7xx, there is also a tone depending of the key acceleration : not only the velocity ! On the N1X, the key position is measured while releasing the key and enable half dampening. This illustrates that emulating an acoustic piano can be difficult and even recently we have some progress.

My choice of a DP is mainly something which sound as close as an acoustic piano, but can be used with headphones… This limit the choice.

Electric guitars were invented to magnetically pick up pure string sounds for feedback-free amplification. All the shenanigans digital piano aficionados care about like "string resonance" and "resonance modeling" aren't wanted in an original electric (log) guitar. That's why the Fender Telecaster is a brick of solid wood. They were deliberately designed to not sound like an acoustic guitar.

Electric pianos were invented to provide keyboard instruments for home and stage use, which emulate the acoustic piano, while being easier to carry and cheaper to make. Just look at old advertisements for them. They turned out so bad at emulating acoustic piano, that they became their own instrument.


However digital amplifiers became a thing, they emulate tube amplifiers and cabinets, but the original sound still comes from strings. There are no samples or digital string models involved anywhere.